The life of Haji Bektash Veli, the thirteenth-century eponym of the Bektashi Order, is recounted in a text known as the Vilayetname. While the oldest extant copies of the text go back only to the early seventeenth century, the text was clearly first set down in writing in an earlier period, probably the late fifteenth century, and no doubt incorporates oral legends that had been transmitted prior to that. The obscure process of its composition coincides historically with the equally obscure formation of a distinct Bektashi order through several generations of disciples based at the site of Haji Bektash’s tomb. Besides providing legendary information about the life of the saint, then, the text can help elucidate the complex process of social, cultural and religious formation undergone by the community that bore his name. This paper will thus analyze elements of the Vilayetname that reflect the concerns of this community in its process of formation. The emergent Bektashi Order faced a competition for disciples at a time when other Sufi orders were also being formed, so the Vilayetname includes episodes in which Haji Bektash is shown to be superior to other founding saints and charismatic leaders in terms of prescience and the ability to perform miracles, such as with the narratives of the subjugation of the Rum Erenleri, the contest with Mahmud Hayrani, and encounters with Mevlana, Ahi Evran and a Christian priest. As the Ottoman Empire was in the process of becoming more orthodox religiously, many heterodox movements were being absorbed into the Bektashi community, and the Vilayetname shows Haji Bektash counteracting the reprovals of representatives of orthodoxy. It also legitimates Bektashi ritual practices by showing their origins in the deeds of Haji Bektash himself. And in order to give the Bektashi Order a firm spatial foundation, it recounts many legends that firmly imprint the legacy of Haji Bektash in the landscape around his tomb complex. The legacy of the saint is thus interpreted through the filter of the mobilizing project of a community in the process of formation. Haji Bektash becomes a symbolic figure on whom the Bektashi community projects its aspirations and around whom it creates its identity. The Vilayetname, then, reflects the self-imagination of the Bektashi order as part of the process of its coming to be.